Lear, King | John Bayley (essay date 1981)
John Bayley (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "The King's Ship," in Shakespeare and Tragedy, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, pp. 7-48.
[In the following excerpt, Bayley compares pre-Shakespearean depictions of the youngest daughter in the Leir legend with Shakespeare's portrayal of Cordelia, finding that the latter "does not seem an original or unusual character to find in a play, but one who is not properly of it or in it. "]
We escape into the metaphysical in order to deal with King Lear, where the eighteenth century took a simpler, more robust, way out. The Romantics, Keats and Lamb for instance, have accustomed us to the idea of 'burning through' the play, and Hazlitt to the idea, which even Wilson Knight would be a little shy of countenancing too openly, that it is the play in which Shakespeare 'was most in earnest.' Lamb's query—'What gesture shall we appropriate to this?'—hits one nail on the head, but then opts for the...
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